Between footage filmed by both Nova festival survivors and Hamas, first responders to the massacre tell Sandberg harrowing accounts of what they witnessed when arriving.
“Everywhere we go there are bodies on the road, there are bodies everywhere, everywhere. It’s an indescribable catastrophe,” one responder said.
A volunteer at ZAKA (Disaster victim identification) said that despite being trained to collect body parts and bodies in hard situations, he “doesn’t have words to explain what we saw.” They found mutilated bodies “cut to pieces, you couldn’t identify if it was a man or a woman, everything was ripped,” he said, and many bodies were naked.
One woman was found by ZAKA inside a home, under a mattress, with “nails around her female organs… She’s a woman so you could do whatever you want.”
Another reasoned: “When you see one woman, then another, and another, all with signs of abuse in the groin area, you understand that this wasn’t a random thing.”
Responders show Sandberg graphic pictures they took on their phones, including of the woman with nails around her groin, one with a piece of metal inside her, and another stabbed in the groin with a knife. “There’s no question about what they did there,” they said.
Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta and founder of LeanIn.org, is launching a documentary to highlight the pervasive gender-based violence committed by Hamas on and after October 7. (Photo: Screenshot via X)[Missing Credit]
Rami Davidian, a first responder volunteer to the Nova massacre site, revisits a woodland with Sandberg where on October 7 he found young women tied to trees, with their hands behind them. Some of the ropes used still wrapped around the trees in the film. He said: “Someone murdered them, raped them, and abused them here on these trees. Their legs were spread. Everyone who sees this knows right away that the girls were abused. Someone stripped them, someone raped them.
“They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here.”
Davidian painfully recalls having to “close their legs and cover their bodies so no one else would see what I saw. No one can see those kinds of things.”
A security guard at the festival, Elad Avraham, describes finding women, lying on their backs or fronts, with their clothes and skirts torn off and their legs spread.
Raz Cohen, survivor of the Nova music festival, witnessed from his hiding place several men in a semi-circle around a woman and at least one man raping her before and after her murder.
Many women were found with mutilated genitals, bullet holes in their genitals, and across several locations women were found with their breasts cut off. Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, former vice-president of the UN Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, said the findings “depict a pattern that could not have been unless it was premeditated and preconceived by Hamas themselves.”
Sandberg speaks to former Hamas captives including Amit Soussana, hostage for 55 days, who describes being alone with her captor. After tricking him into thinking she had her period for several days, she could not deceive him any longer and was forced “to commit a sexual act on him.”
Agam Goldstein Almog, hostage for 51 days, said of the other female hostages she has met, half had experienced sexual attacks while in captivity.
Dr Ayelet Levy Shachar, mother of Naama Levy, who is currently a hostage and who appears in a widely seen video in which she is pulled out of the back of a black jeep handcuffed and bloody around her groin, also speaks to Sandberg about the emotional trauma and her worry for her daughter.
The film also includes footage of interrogations of Hamas terrorists in which at least one admits to raping a woman on October 7.
Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist at the October 7 military morgue, said they found so many women shot in the head that there “seemed like there was an intention, an objective, to obliterate their faces.” She said using sexual violence as a weapon of war on October 7 seemed “systematic.”
Due to many of the victims of sexual violence having been murdered on October 7, Mendes says “we may never know the extent of the sexual violence, because these women were silenced.”
Mirit Ben Mayor, chief superintendent of Israel Police, said they have collected over 2000 testimonies and 200,000 pieces of visual evidence, among which there is “substantial evidence for sexual violence that took place on October 7.”
The film’s makers said they decided against showing explicit images out of respect for the victims and their families.
At the end of the hour-long film, Sandberg said: “This is the most important work of my life,”
She added that since October 7 it has “felt like we were sliding back to a place where we would start accepting the unacceptable,” and this was a chance to “give these amazing witnesses the chance for people to hear from them in their words in this film what happened.
“Anyone who watches this film can bear witness, and we can take that pain and take that trauma, and turn it into hope, turn it into commitment, turn it into conviction, that we are not going to let this happen again.”
In March, the United Nations published a report indicating that rape and gang rape likely occurred during the October 7 onslaught, and that “clear and convincing” evidence showed that hostages were raped while being held in Gaza.
The film can be watched on Youtube and at screamsbeforesilence.com.
